Watermarking photos and videos is a way to ensure content and brand protection, increase personalization and user engagement, and, in some cases, achieve legal compliance. If you are developing a mobile application for Android or iOS, learning how to add watermarks to pictures and videos can be crucial to your app's success.

Many users seek this functionality in an app, but for developers, the implementation can be extremely hard. However, a camera SDK with a robust watermark API can help you reduce development time, integrate a wider range of features, and efficiently deliver watermarks to your end users.

Keep reading to learn why watermarking is important, how to choose between in-house and camera SDK solutions, and how to implement watermarks using camera SDKs with a step-by-step guide.

Why is watermarking important?

Watermarking photos and videos is a crucial step in protecting intellectual property, preventing unauthorized use, promoting your brand, engaging your users, and ensuring legal compliance.

It becomes even more significant in mobile applications, where captured photos and videos are often shared by users and watermarks can help your product reach a broader audience. Check out some details:

• Protect intellectual property: Watermarks can ensure the brand identity is attributed to the visual content, protecting it from unauthorized reproduction and use. This can be done by adding visual or invisible markers to the photos.

• Promote your brand: Watermarks can help reinforce brand recognition by giving pictures and videos a professional look. In addition, when users share media outside of your mobile application, the watermark becomes free advertising for your brand and products.

• Increase user engagement: The ability to overlay images on media applies perfectly to stickers, emojis and other UI elements that are commonly used in modern applications. This lets your application be more engaging for the user.

• Ensure legal compliance: In some industries, watermarks are not only a feature but a requirement that ensures copyright rights, regulatory compliance, professional attribution, and confidentiality standards.

Choosing between in-house and camera SDK solutions

Implementing watermark functionality into your Android or iOS application can be hard for developers because of several reasons:

• The platform you are using may expose hard-to-use APIs
• The platform you are using may not provide complete control over the camera pipeline
• Lack of experience with low-level graphics APIs
• Lack of resources

In most cases, it is recommended to look for a camera SDK that natively implements watermarks and consider the following factors:

• Customization: Ensure the API offers comprehensive customization options, like supporting a variety of watermark styles, offering complete control of appearance settings like size, position, and opacity, and dynamic content personalization.
• Video Support: Some SDK support the addition of watermarks and overlays on both pictures and videos. Video watermarks are harder to implement, but provide many benefits in terms of brand protection and engagement.
• Performance: Guarantee that the watermark API performs efficiently without compromising the quality, causing delays, and affecting rendering time, for example.
• Compatibility: The camera SDK should be compatible with all devices and platforms that you plan to support. If your application works on Android and iOS, it is preferable to find a single SDK that works on both, with similar or identical APIs.
• Integration process: Look for a watermark API with a straightforward integration process, including detailed documentation and support, and easy integration with other elements of your app like UI frameworks.
• Advanced features: Check whether the SDK offers advanced features on top of watermarking that can improve your mobile application.
• Scalability: Ensure the SDK can be scalable according to the company's needs without compromising performance and efficiency.

How to add watermarks to photos using camera SDKs

Each SDK has its own integration process. However, in general terms, these are the steps necessary to add the watermark feature on an app using a camera SDK:

1. Integrate the camera SDK.
2. Configure the camera view.
3. Customize the watermark.
4. Take a photo and test the results.

Integrate the camera SDK

Follow the integration instructions provided by the camera SDK, typically on their website or GitHub page. This includes downloading the SDK, setting up your development environment and obtaining API keys (for paid SDKs) and so on. For example:

• In Android apps, you may have to add a new dependency in your Gradle build file.
• In iOS apps, you may have to register the dependency in XCode or using the Swift Package Manager.

Configure the camera view

After setting up the camera SDK, you should configure your application code to use it. If your application doesn’t have a camera screen, you can simply follow the SDK documentation on how to implement a simple camera view in your UI, depending on your platform and UI framework.

On the other hand, if your application already has a camera screen, you will have to replace the old code with the SDK and replicate all the existing features. If you choose a high quality, full-featured SDK, this step should be easy and allow you to remove lots of hard-to-maintain lines of code from your project.

Customize the watermark

At this stage you are ready to configure watermarks. Depending on your product, you may choose to use your brand logo, a custom image, or a completely different element. For example, it is possible to use the watermarking functionality to let users place emojis and stickers on the camera output.

At this stage, you should also decide whether your watermarks will appear on photos, on the camera preview, and on videos if the SDK supports it.

In addition, some SDKs like DeepMedia Camera SDK support watermark animations and composition, enabling creative effects like a full-screen animation scene at the beginning of video recordings.

Take a photo and test the results

Once everything is set up you are ready to see watermarks in action. Use your application to take a test photo and evaluate the quality of the results. Some common problems at this stage are:

• Poor watermark quality: you may fix this by using a higher quality image.
• Wrong watermark position or rendering: you will fix it by correcting your code.
• Poor SDK performance: in this case, you should reach out to the SDK providers.

It is crucial that you check the quality of the results on multiple devices and scenarios in your application flow. If everything looks good, you are ready to ship watermarks in the next version of your mobile application!

Learn more about the DeepMedia Camera SDK

If you read this far, you understand how watermarks can be a valuable and attractive feature for your camera app, allowing brand promotion, intellectual property protection and user engagement when taking photos and videos.

If you want to add this functionality to your app, choosing the proper camera SDK is essential. The DeepMedia Camera SDK is the ideal solution for this job: it is easy to implement, supports iOS and Android with a unified API, and integrates with other powerful DeepMedia SDKs.

Check out our documentation and start adding watermarks to photos in your app today!